With the help, on the one hand, of a fragment of a dog’s femur discovered in Alaska in the 1990s, and “only” 10,000 years old, and with the help, on the other hand, of what genetics discovered in recent years in dogs that had lived even longer in Siberia, a team from the State University of New York at Buffalo deducted that a “family” of Siberian dogs had broken away from the others to form the first North American family, almost 17,000 years ago.
If these dogs did come with humans, that eliminates for good the theory that the mainland’s settlement expected an opening in the glacier chain from Alaska to Montana, because this “passage” does not has not been possible for thousands of years. The theory that the first Americans rather arrived along the coast, from Alaska to British Columbia, is therefore reinforced.
Unsurprisingly, genetics also confirm that this Alaskan dog was related to the lineage which would also populate the Americas, distinct from that which would arrive much later in the company of Europeans.
Moreover, geneticists estimate for a few years that the families constituting the wolves and the dogs today separated 40,000 years ago. This supposes a slow “taming”, spread over millennia, between the human and the animal which would gradually become a companion.
Photo: kategorgeous / Pixabay
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